Ronni
Well-known Member
- Location
- Nashville TN
Upbringing and family lifestyle can play a huge part in one's ability to be vulnerable, open etc, and be able to understand the difference between secrecy, and discretional privacy. Being secret, and being private are very different animals! Family/generational trauma is still largely not understood, though it's getting more play now thankfully. I'm so sorry for what you went through @StarSong.There's a difference between being friendly, which I am both here and IRL, and divulging info that could be useful to bad actors. Like you, Ronni, I chat up strangers. I can be open to the point of being (as my therapist mentioned years ago) "leaky." Much of my life is an open book, even on SF.
In my case, not easily distinguishing what should be held close from what should be openly shared comes from being born into a family with lots of secrets. It drove me bat-sh!t crazy as a child. I knew things were not as they were being portrayed but lacked the life experience and maturity to suss out what was really happening. Result? I don't always recognize the difference between being circumspect and lying. So I'm leaky.
Even so, I'm cautious about giving social media specific, identifying details about myself or my family. No advance information about where I'm going. Personal identifiers and info when one's house will be vacant, work schedule details, etc., are strongly cautioned against by police and security experts.
I'm extremely security minded about my family, my home, and my resources.
I do understand about being too open on social media. If I didn't have family to housesit, wonderful neighbors who keep an eye on things even when we're just out for an afternoon, and privacy settings in full force on fb, I wouldn't be sharing as I do about vacations, dinner, outings with family etc. My FB feed is heavily curated, and even though I have lots of friends who follow me and who I follow, they are all known to me in one way or another.
I don't need or want the status of having thousands of fb friends the way some do. Not for me. I just want to keep track of the folks I know, the family I love, and there's no better way for me than social media. It's not for everyone, but I very much enjoy the informative feed, the interactions, the funny memes, and especially the ridiculous reels when it's late and my thoughts are churning and I'm ruminating and I can't sleep. I need distraction desperately then.
Speaking to general security concerns, I'm very cautious when it comes to things like passwords, scams, not clicking on things I don't recognize etc. A lot of the tech support I do for clients involves backing them out of things they've inadvertently gotten themselves into as a result of believing their computer has a virus, or their account has been hacked, or there's a package for them at UPS, or countless other pfishing scams that abound on the internet. Those kinds of problems are largely avoidable with a bit of discernment that comes from having enough information to spot them.
My book can be found both in autobiography and fiction, depending on the author.